by E. B. Sledge
It was an appalling chaos. I was terribly afraid. Fear was obvious on the faces of my comrades, too, as we raced to the low slope and began to dig in rapidly. It was such a jolt to leave the quiet, beautiful countryside that morning and plunge into a thunderous, deadly storm of steel that afternoon. Going onto the beach to assault Peleliu and attacking across the airfield there, we had braced ourselves for the blows that fell. But the shock and shells of 1 May at Okinawa, after the reprieve of a pleasant April, caught us off balance.
Fear has many facets, and I do not minimize my fear and terror during that day. But it was different. I was a combat veteran of Peleliu. With terror's first constriction over, I knew what to expect. I felt dreadful fear but not nearpanic. Experience had taught me what to expect from the enemy guns. More important, I knew I could control my fear. The terrible dread that I might panic was gone. I knew that all anyone could do under shell fire was to hug the deck and pray—and curse the Japanese.
There was the brassy, metallic twang of the small 50mm knee mortar shells as little puffs of dirty smoke appeared thickly around us. The 81mm and 90mm mortar shells crashed and banged all along the ridge. The whiz-bang of the high-velocity 47mm gun's shells (also an antitank gun), which was on us with its explosion almost as soon as we heard it whizz into the area, gave me the feeling the Japanese were firing them at us like rifles. The slower screaming, whining sound of the 75mm artillery shells seemed the most abundant. Then there was the roar and rumble of the huge enemy 150mm howitzer shell, and the kaboom of its explosion. It was what the men called the big stuff. I didn't recall having recognized any of it in my confusion and fear at Peleliu. The bursting radius of these big shells was of awesome proportions. Added to all this noise was the swishing and fluttering overhead of our own supporting artillery fire. Our shells could be heard bursting out across the ridge over enemy positions. The noise of small-arms fire from both sides resulted in a chaotic bedlam of racket and confusion.
We were just below the crest of a low sloping section of the ridge. It was about ten feet high and on the left of our company's zone. Snafu and I began to dig the gun pit, and the ammo carriers dug in with two-man foxholes. Digging in Okinawa's claylike soil was easy, a luxury after the coral rock of Peleliu.
No sooner had we begun to dig in than terrible news arrived about mounting casualties in the company. The biggest blow was the word that Privates Nease and Westbrook had been killed. Both of these men were liked and admired by us all. Westbrook was a new man, a friendly curly-headed blond and one of the youngest married men in the outfit. I believe he wasn't yet twenty. Howard Nease was young in years but an old salt with a combat record that started at Cape Gloucester.
Many men were superstitious about one's chances of surviving a third campaign. By that time one's luck was wearing thin, some thought. I heard this idea voiced by Guadalcanal veterans who also had survived Gloucester and then struggled against the odds on Peleliu.
“Howard's luck just run out, that's all. Ain't no damn way a guy can go on forever without gittin’ hit,” gloomily remarked a Gloucester veteran who had joined Company K with Nease two campaigns before Okinawa.
We took the news of those deaths hard. Added to the stress of the day, it put us into an angry frame of mind as we dug in. Against whom should we pour out our anger while we were unable to fire at the enemy?
Most of us had finished digging in when we suddenly noticed that our pugnacious lieutenant, Mac, was still digging feverishly. He was excavating a deep one-man foxhole and throwing out a continuous shower of dirt with his entrenching shovel. While shells were still coming in, the fire had slackened a bit in our area. But Mac continued to burrow underground.
I don't know who started it, but I think it was Snafu who reminded Mac of his oft-repeated promise to charge the enemy line as soon as any of our guys got hit. Once the kidding began, several of us veterans chimed in and vigorously encouraged Mac to keep his promise.
“Now that Nease and Westbrook been killed, ain't it about time you took your kabar and .45 and charged them Nips, Mac?” Snafu asked.
Mac never stopped digging; he simply answered that he had to dig in. I told him I would lend him my kabar, but another man said with mock seriousness, “Naw, Sledgehammer, he might not be able to return it to you.”
“Boy, when Mac gets over to them Nips, he's gonna clean house, and this blitz gonna be a pushover,” someone else said.
But Mac only grunted and showed no inclination to charge the enemy—or to stop digging. He burrowed like a badger. Our jibes didn't seem to faze him. We kept our comments respectful because of his rank, but we gave it to him good for all the bravado and nonsense he had been mouthing off with ever since he joined the company.
“Mac, if you dig that hole much deeper they'll get you for desertion,” someone said.
“Yeah, my mom use'ta tell me back home if I dug a hole deep enough I'd come through to China. Maybe if you keep digging you'll get through to the States, and we can all crawl in there and go home, Mac,” came one comment accompanied by a grin.
Mac could hear us but was totally oblivious to our comments. It's hard to believe that we actually talked that way to a Marine officer, but it happened, and it was hilarious. He deserved every bit of it.
When he finally got his foxhole deep enough, he began laying wooden boards from ammo boxes over all of the top except for one small opening through which he could squirm. Then he threw about six inches of soil on top of the boards. We sat in our holes, watching him and the shelling to our right rear. When he had completed the cover over his hole, which actually made it a small dugout with limited visibility, Mac got in and proudly surveyed his work. He had been too occupied to pay much heed to us, but now he explained carefully to us how the boards with soil on top would protect him from shell fragments.
George Sarrett, who wasn't interested in the lecture, inched up the little slope several feet and peeped over the crest to see if there were any enemy troops moving around out front. He didn't look long, because a Japanese on the next ridge saw him and fired a burst from a machine gun that narrowly missed him. As the slugs came snapping over, George jerked his head down, lost his balance, slid back down the slope, and landed on top of Mac's dugout, causing the roof to cave in. The startled lieutenant jumped up, pushing boards and soil aside like a turtle rearing up out of a pile of debris.
“You ruined my foxhole!” Mac complained.
George apologized, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. The other men smirked and grinned. We never heard any more from Mac about charging the Japanese line with his kabar and .45 caliber pistol. That enemy shelling had one beneficial result: it dissolved his bravado.
We got our positions squared away for the night and ate some K rations, as well as one could with a stomach tied in knots. More details reached us about the loss of Nease, West-brook, and others killed and wounded. We regretted any American casualties, but when they were close friends it was terribly depressing. They were just the first of what was to grow into a long tragic list before we would come out of combat fifty hellish days later.*
Before dark we learned there would be a big attack the next morning all along the U.S. line. With the heavy Japanese fire poured onto us as we moved into that line, we dreaded the prospect of making a push. An NCO told us that our objective was to reach the Asato Gawa, a stream about 1,500 yards south of us that stretched inland and eastward to an area near the village of Dakeshi.
Rain ushered in a gloomy dawn. We were apprehensive but hopeful. There was some small-arms fire along the line, and a few shells passed back and forth during early morning. The rain slackened temporarily and we ate some K rations. On the folding pocket-sized tripod issued to us, I heated up a canteen cup of coffee with a sterno tablet. I had to hover over it to keep the rain from drowning it out.
As the seconds ticked slowly toward 0900, our artillery and ships’ guns increased their rate of fire. The rain poured down, and the Japanese took up the challenge
from our artillery. They started throwing more shells our way, many of which passed over us and exploded far to our rear where our own artillery was emplaced.
Finally we received orders to open fire with our mortars. Our shells exploded along a defilade to our front. Our machine guns opened up in earnest. Our artillery, ships’ guns, and 81mm mortars increased the tempo to an awesome rate as the time for the attack approached. The shells whistled, whined, and rumbled overhead, ours bursting out in front of the ridge and the enemy's exploding in our area and to the rear. The noise increased all along the line. Rain fell in torrents, and the soil became muddy and slippery wherever we hurried around the gun pit to break out and stack our ammo.
I looked at my watch. It was 0900. I gulped and prayed for my buddies in the rifle platoons.
“Mortars cease firing and stand by.”
We were ready to fire or to take up the mortars at a moment's notice and move forward. Some of our riflemen moved past the crest of the ridge to attack. Noise that had been loud now grew into deafening bedlam. The riflemen hardly got out of their foxholes when a storm of enemy fire from our front and left flank forced them back. The same thing was happening to the battalions on our right and left.
The sound of the many machine guns became one incredible rattle against a thundering and booming of artillery. Rifles popped everywhere along the line, while Japanese slugs snapped over the low ridge behind which we lay. We fired some white phosphorous shells to screen our withdrawing troops. Just as we heard “Cease firing,” a Marine came running through the mud on the slope to our right, yelling, “The guys pulling back need a stretcher team from mortars!”
Three other mortarmen and I took off on the double after the messenger. With bullets snapping and popping overhead, we ran along for about forty yards, keeping just below the crest of the ridge. We came to a road cut through the ridge about eight feet below the crest; an officer told us to stand behind him until we were ordered to go out and bring in the casualty. This was the exact spot where Nease and Westbrook had been machine-gunned the day before. Japanese bullets were zipping and swishing through the cut like hail pouring through an open window.
A couple of Company K rifle squads were running back toward us from the abortive attack. They rushed along the road in small groups and turned right and left as soon as they got through the cut to get out of the line of fire. Incredibly, none got hit by the thick fire coming through the cut. I knew most of them well, although some of the new men not as well as the veterans. They all wore wild-eyed, shocked expressions that showed only too vividly they were men who had barely escaped chance's strange arithmetic. They clung to their Mls, BARs, and Tommy guns and slumped to the mud to pant for breath before moving behind the ridge toward their former foxholes. The torrential rain made it all seem so much more unbelievable and terrible.
I hoped fervently that we wouldn't have to step out into that road to pick up a casualty. I felt ashamed for thinking this, because I knew full well that if I were lying out there wounded, my fellow Marines wouldn't leave me. But I didn't see how anyone could go out and get back now that the volume of fire was so intense; since most of our attacking troops had fallen back, the Japanese could concentrate their fire on the stretcher teams as I had seen them do at Peleliu. They showed medical personnel no mercy.
Our company gunnery sergeant, Hank Boyes, was the last man through the cut. He made a quick check of the men and announced—to my immense relief—that everyone had made it back; casualties had been brought back farther down the line where the machine-gun fire hadn't been as heavy.
Boyes was amazing. He had dashed out to the men pinned down in front of the ridge, where he threw smoke grenades to shield them from the Japanese fire. He returned with a hole shot through his dungaree cap (he wasn't wearing his helmet) and another through his pants leg. He had been hit in the leg with fragments from a Japanese knee mortar shell but refused to turn in.*
The officer told us we wouldn't be needed as stretcher bearers and to return to our posts. As we took off on the double to the gun pits, the shells kept up their heavy traffic back and forth, but the bullets began to slacken off somewhat with all our men by then under cover of the ridge. I jumped into the gun pit, and my temporary replacement hurried back to his hole.*
We crouched in our foxholes in the pouring rain, cursing the Japanese, the shells, and the weather. The enemy gunners poured fire into our company area to discourage another attack. Word came down the line that all attacking Marine units had suffered considerable casualties, so we would remain inactive until the next day. That suited us fine. The Japanese shelling continued viciously for some time. We all felt depressed about the failure of the attack and we still didn't know how many friends we had lost, an uncertainty that always bore down on every man after an attack or fire fight.
From the gun pit, which contained several inches of water, we looked out on a gloomy scene. The rain had settled into a steady pelting that promised much misery. Across the muddy fields we saw our soaked comrades crouching forlornly in their muddy holes and ducking, as we did, each time a shell roared over.
This was my first taste of mud in combat, and it was more detestable than I had ever imagined. Mud in camp on Pavuvu was a nuisance. Mud on maneuvers was an inconvenience. But mud on the battlefield was misery beyond description. I had seen photographs of World War I troops in the mud—the men grinning, of course, if the picture was posed. If not posed, the faces always wore a peculiarly forlorn, disgusted expression, an expression I now understood. The air was chilly and clammy, but I thanked God we weren't experiencing this misery in Europe where the foxholes were biting cold as well as wet.
The shelling finally subsided, and things got fairly quiet in our area. We squatted thankfully in our holes and grumbled about the rain. The humid air hung heavily with the chemical odor of exploded shells.
Shortly, to our left rear, we saw a Marine stretcher team bringing a casualty back through the rain. Instead of turning left behind the ridge we were on, or right behind the one farther across the field, the team headed straight back between the two low ridges. This was a mistake, because we knew the Japanese could still fire on that area.
As the stretcher team approached the cover of some trees, Japanese riflemen to our left front opened up on them. We saw bullets kicking up mud and splashing in the puddles of water around the team. The four stretcher bearers hurried across the slippery field. But they couldn't go faster than a rapid walk, or the casualty might fall off the stretcher.
We requested permission to fire 60mm phosphorous shells as a smoke screen (we were too far away to throw smoke grenades to cover the stretcher team). Permission was denied. We weren't allowed to fire across our company front because of the possibility of hitting unseen friendly troops. Thus we watched helplessly as the four stretcher bearers struggled across the muddy field with bullets falling all around them. It was one of those terribly pathetic, heartrending sights that seemed to rule in combat: men struggling to save a wounded comrade, the enemy firing at them as fast as they could, and the rest of us utterly powerless to give any aid. To witness such a scene was worse than personal danger. It was absolute agony.
To lighten their loads, the four carriers had put all of their personal equipment aside except for a rifle or carbine over their shoulders. Each held a handle of the stretcher in one hand and stretched out the other arm for balance. Their shoulders were stooped with the weight of the stretcher. Four hel-meted heads hung low like four beasts of burden being flogged. Soaked with rain and spattered with mud, the dark green dungarees hung forlornly on the men. The casualty lay inert on the narrow canvas stretcher, his life in the hands of the struggling four.
To our dismay, the two carriers in the rear got hit by a burst of fire. Each loosened his grip on the stretcher. Their knees buckled, and they fell over backwards onto the muddy ground. The stretcher pitched onto the deck. A gasp went up from the men around me, but it turned almost immediately into roars of relief. The two
Marines at the other end of the stretcher threw it down, spun around, and grabbed the stretcher casualty between them. Then each supported a wounded carrier with his other arm. As we cheered, all five assisted one another and limped and hobbled into the cover of the bushes, bullets still kicking up mud all around them. I felt relief and elation over their escape, matched only by a deepened hatred for the Japanese.
Before nightfall we received information that Company K would push again the next day. As the rain slowly diminished and then ceased, we made our grim preparations.
While receiving extra ammo, rations, and water, I saw our company officers and NCOs gathering nearby. They stood or squatted around the CO, talking quietly. Our company commander was obviously in charge, giving orders and answering questions. The senior NCOs and the veteran officers stood by with serious, sometimes worried expressions as they listened. Those of us in the ranks watched their familiar faces carefully for signs of what was in store for us.
The faces of the replacement lieutenants reflected a different mood. They showed enthusiastic, animated expressions with eyebrows raised in eager anticipation of seeing the thing through like a successful field problem at OCS in Quantico. They were very conscientious and determined to do their best or die in the effort. To me, those young officers appeared almost tragic in their naive innocence and ignorance of what lay ahead for us all.
The new officers bore a heavy burden. Not only were they going into combat with all its terrors and unknowns for the first time—conditions even the best of training couldn't possibly duplicate—but they were untried officers. Combat was the acid test. Faced with heavy responsibilities and placed in a position of leadership amid hardened, seasoned Marine combat veterans in a proud, elite division like the First was a difficult situation and a terrific challenge for any young lieutenant. No one I knew in the ranks envied them in the least.